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“The road to eight years is a long path, with the occasional curve and the occasional dark spot.”

Eight years. That’s frightening. I started the Web site on March 23, 1996. Back then, I was a freshman in high school. I was fourteen years old. Now I am a college graduate and 22 years old. And what a path it’s been. It’s had its curves, when I’ve deliberately altered its course through redesigns, giving it sections, and new structure. But I really do believe my Web site has a bit of a “life of its own” in that as the Webmaster, I just go with my inspirations and kind of let the Web site grow. It makes for a fun site when you do it that way. I don’t plan out my photography sets at the beginning of the fiscal year, and say, “I’m going to do this number of photo sets on these topics in Washington, these sets in Roanoke, and these sets in Richmond.” In fact, a lot of the stuff that I am really proud of are ones that were done with little planning at all. Take the anti-war protest from last April, for instance. For that one, I found out about it the night before, and it filled a trip that had already been planned. It was definitely more interesting than the stuff I had planned for that day, and brought a number of viewpoints to my little piece of online real estate. And yes, I do have my low points, or “dark spots”. In 1998, I was running out of space, and hosting problems caused my images to go out. Finally, I switched to a new host, and got things straight again. And in 2000, I realized my site had gotten unwieldy, and so for the first time I sorted things out into sections. Still, whenever I look back and think about the fact that I’ve had my site now for eight years, I’m just amazed, as it’s been more than a third of my life that I’ve been going tappity-tappity-tappity on the keyboard, telling the world about Ben Schumin, the person I know best. And my goodness… who knows what will happen next…